In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrisson has penned a powerful essay calling out the violent lengths white people will go to “to keep alive the perception of white superiority.”
She writes in a response to the election called “Mourning for Whiteness” that white people are willing to burn down black churches and shoot black children, even though “they may hate their behavior.” After a black president and a burst of “people of color everywhere,” their fear is mounting that “their natural superiority is being lost.”
“So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength,” she writes, going on to point out how easily Trump voters supported a man who wouldn’t rent to or hire black people and who questioned whether our black president was born in the U.S.
“These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble,” she writes.
You can read the entire essay, along with 15 others by noted writers, here.